Saudi Arabia's House Of Cards - Forbes.com

How stable is Saudi Arabia? Not very, according to at least one member of the Kingdom's ruling class. Last month Prince Turki bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud, a prominent dissident now in exile in Cairo, issued an open letter to his fellow royals, urging them to abandon their desert fiefdom for greener pastures. According to the prince, the current social compact between the House of Saud and its subjects had become untenable, with the government no longer able to "impose" its writ on the people and growing grassroots discontent at the royals "interfering in people's private life and restricting their liberties." His advice? That King Abdullah and his coterie flee the Kingdom before they are overthrown--and before their opponents "cut off our heads in streets."

Or so the story goes. Reports of Turki's missive have understandably made a splash in the Iranian press, with Riyadh's regional rival engaging in some thinly veiled schadenfreude. But the actual letter itself is exceedingly hard to come by, at least in its English translation. Were it not for a report from the country's official news agency denouncing the communiqué, you might think the entire episode was made up.

Real or fabricated, however, the warning is instructive. Seventy-eight years after Abdul Aziz ibn Saud triumphantly carved out his kingdom on the Arabian Peninsula following a quarter-century of warfare against rival tribes, Saudi Arabia is living on borrowed time. And the likely culprit of its eventual undoing is the one commodity that allowed ibn Saud to secure international legitimacy in the years following his country's founding: oil.